I wonder if there's something going on similar to the Curse of Dimensionality: when we reduce to one dimension at a time, there's way more interior than surface, and we see overwhelming overlap; when we take the gestalt in all dimensions, there's way more surface than interior, and we see separable populations?
There's a similar phenomenon you might encounter in language: if you have a text, and you sample one random letter at a time from it, it turns out not to be very difficult to determine what language the text is written in. Does the letter 'i' exist in French? Does it exist outside French? Sure, but nevertheless you can rule French in or out based on how often you sample a letter and get 'i'. French uses the same 'i' as everyone else, but it uses it in its own distinctively French way.
This is what makes it trivial to break substitution ciphers given a long enough ciphertext.
I could believe this for romance languages. I'd need somebody to explain how this applies in ideograms and non-western languages, and what the outliers are, vowels vs consonant.
There are no differences; this is not a category of any interest. Urdu is a non-western language, except of course that it is, in a global sense, very closely related to French. (Why do you think we say "Indo-European"?)
2. Ideograms.
The modern language that comes closest to using written ideograms is Japanese. But the language that comes closest to what you're probably thinking of is Mandarin Chinese, where every character is fairly rare.
You have exactly the same options that you do with any other language: you could render the text into an alphabet of interest, or you can do your analysis on the symbols the text is originally written in. That second approach will make some questions much easier; if you sample a letter and get န်, you can be certain you're not reading French.
It will make analyzing Chinese harder because character frequencies are so low.
(see https://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/li... - the most common character in written Chinese is 的 at 4.1% of all characters; the second most common accounts for an additional 1.6% of all characters. The top 152 characters collectively account for 50% of all text.)
This will mean that codebreaking requires longer texts.† It won't have much effect on the problem of identifying the language by sampling unenciphered monograms from it; that stays easy, because the commonly used characters are highly informative even if e.g. you're comparing written Mandarin to written Cantonese. You'll probably need more samples (for an equally reliable judgment) than you would for a script that didn't have so many unique characters.
† This problem is significant. Specific content words will all be rare, and we can't really expect a message, even a very long message, to discuss every possible topic at the same frequency that the corpus of written Chinese as a whole does. Even if we could expect that, the amount of ciphertext you'd need to reliably distinguish the 3100th-most common character in this corpus (酱 [noun, 'sauce'] representing 0.09% of all characters) from the 2494th-most common (娶 [verb, 'to marry a woman'] representing 0.19% of all characters) would be quite large.
Same kind of thing works with counting the frequency of particular digits (n-digit analysis) in a given position for an integer or decimal. Especially for the higher order decimal digits there's a far-from-random distribution that you can use to infer whether there's been any tampering, given enough values to study.
That won't help you understand the mechanism. The reason the first digit of a binary number is 1 is just the anthropic principle. ("You can only observe things that exist.") That same observation will tell you that, just as the first nonzero digit of a binary number is zero 0% of the time, the first nonzero digit of a decimal number is zero 0% of the time. That is what it means to be a nonzero digit! But it won't tell you anything about why one possible digit might be more or less frequent than another possible digit.
The mechanism is just multiplication. Suppose you have a quantity that increases by 20% every period. (Doesn't matter what the period is.) Let's start the quantity at 4 times 10 to the power of irrelevant. We'll consider the leading digit every period:
As you can see, we spend a lot more time with the amount of stuff we have being led by a 1 than we do with it being led by any other digit. Having our growth rate be less than one makes this easy to see by causing similar leading digits to occur next to each other, but the result will be the same for any growth rate.
(You can see that it will be the same for any growth rate by considering that you can always match the observations of a system with the same observation period and a different growth rate by instead imagining a system with the same growth rate and a different observation period. But varying the observation period doesn't change the amount of time spent in any given quantity range.)
> Especially for the higher order decimal digits there's a far-from-random distribution that you can use to infer whether there's been any tampering, given enough values to study.
Inversely, the lowest order decimals tend to be evenly distributed, which is also a useful way to detect tampering (trying to make the numbers look "random" does anything but).
In the past 12 months I’ve gone from having normal male levels of testosterone and estrogen to having normal female levels of both.
It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this, and I’ve learned so much from the experience. It’s hard to describe the changes precisely, but I’m finding that women make more sense to me and are more interesting to talk to, while I have a lower tolerance for men trying to act tough, which before seemed silly but now seems annoying. I’ve also found that I have less interest in action movies and recently I’ve been more interested in romantic comedies and stories of people.
At Christmas dinner my dad got really racist and previously I would have gotten very angry and probably tried to set him straight, but instead I just felt sad and upset and I calmly got up from the table and walked away to calm down.
I’ve also started experiencing monthly cycles where for about one week a month I feel more tired and weepy like I could cry very easily. I have WAY more sympathy for women who have difficult periods now, because I never actually understood the extent to which it affects them. I think now it’s unfair that we expect women to show up and work every day and perform the same, because for some women their period can be physically disabling.
I’ve felt like my emotions have gotten stronger except for anger. My other emotions like love and empathy and sadness have gotten stronger, and I also find more variation in them throughout the monthly cycle. Before, my emotions were pretty much the same every day. I mean I had ups and downs, good days and bad days, but it always sort of stayed within a certain range. Now I feel like I’m a certain way for three weeks, and then for the fourth week I have that aforementioned weepyness and stronger feelings.
It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people. I think it’s beautiful that we can do this. It’s helping me understand so much about a world I never quite realized was there. I remember male comedians in the 1990’s complaining about women. It was always a punchline to a cheap joke. But now through hormone therapy individuals can actually cross that line, and experience the other side. I hope that more people do this and share the experience. Everyone needs to hear this story.
Also contrary to what some people would think, I’m no less interested in engineering. I’m still designing and building an open source solar powered farming robot (see my profile) and designing circuit boards and setting up servers for fun. But I’ve also realized that stuff isn’t the only thing I want to do, and I’ve been spending more time sewing and cooking too. I think I’m developing an appreciation for more of the world and becoming a more well rounded person. I wouldn’t say everyone should do this, but it’s definitely the right thing for me. And everyone should have the right to make the same choice if they’d like.
I wonder if experimentally doing this is reversible. Feels like Banks's Culture. Could be interesting to try, to get a feel for the differences in perspective GP reports.
It’s largely reversible in the first six months or so. Generally breast growth is not reversible and for some people that takes a while to start but for some it begins to happen sooner. You could try it for a couple of months and stop if you feel tender nipples, which is a sign of breast growth activity. Though my biggest changes have come a year in to the hormones due to the way they ramp things up over time. I was taking 2mg E per day at the start and now I’m taking 8mg E and 200mg progesterone (which helps suppress testosterone), so my experience now is much stronger than it was a few months in.
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing your story and participating in the discussion. I looked some of these things up with a search engine, but do not know what to trust. Regarding progesterone I saw a few places assert that it increases testosterone (example link below), but it did not discuss the mixed case with E(strogen) you mention.
Some doctor experimented by dosing themselves with progesterone, and found that after a few days it increased their libido significantly, but is completely reversible otherwise.
Depending on method of administration, changes occur sooner or later. A common one is "monotherapy" with only estrogen injections in oils which get released over time.
I hope more people do this because for me it feels really right, and I find it beautiful. It’s also helping me understand women more. I think our society would benefit from a better understanding of the experiences of the opposite sex, and people who do this can help share this with others so we all have a better understanding.
I don’t see any downsides to more people doing this.
Norah Vincent basically broke her psyche trying to live as a man, and the story has barely left an impact on the status quo. Similar stories exist among transmen rather than women going incognito, even if in their case it would be to pick their poison.
The idea that there are no downsides doesn't mesh with reality.
Spend a few days in online circles reading experiences of transmen, then do yourself another solid and spend another few days wading through online circles for men specifically. It's not too hard to see a few transitioners go "well X kinda sucked as a woman but Y definitely sucks now that I am a man".
>The fact that you liken HRT to "picking your poison" is ignorant and disingenuous
What's disingenuous is your extremely uncharitable interpretation, and I would urge you to take a step back and read with a little more favor towards the writer.
Think for a moment by bringing it back to its basis. As a woman with gender dysphoria, you have to pick between undergoing HRT and potentially having disastrous effects on your psyche, or suffering harsher consequences from your dysphoria for living as a woman.
To claim there are 'no downsides' when even the people for who the procedure exists have to pick between the lesser of two evils rather than a straight up boost, is completely off the mark. Vincent's example at least suggests women without dysphoria can't just 'live as a man for a bit' without it having downsides. Transitioners experiencing the same despite a net gain due to their unique circumstances would confirm it, more than deny it.
You fail to see that the laser focus on trans people is exactly why GP's comment doesn't mesh for the average person, as 'people who seriously desire to do this' are not necessarily people who feel uncomfortable or less comfortable with their own gender.
So please, stop making this seem like an attack on trans people. It isn't. It is merely a rebuttal against the idea that men living as women and women living as men, no further qualifiers given, only out of some 'desire to try it', has no downsides.
Norah Vincent had long term depression and anxiety pre-"self made man", the hysteria surrounding her euthanasia relating it back to her early 00's experimentation is completely baseless, the only sources are ladbible/facebook/etc "news" articles who themselves cite no sources.
Would you be in favor of giving people schizophrenia-inducing drugs, with the risk of having permanent mental effects, so people can understand mental health issues better?
These drugs you are taking are no joking matter and your fortuitous lived experience doesn't make your claim less preposterous
It’s a pretty bad example, because the “risk of permanent mental effects” is not a desirable goal, whereas the permanent changes I’m experiencing are things I want. I’m not suggesting that people who don’t want hormone changes try it. I’m suggesting more trans people come out of the closet and try this.
Obviously the commitment is massive, but I would love to gender flip for a year or so.
It's a bit sci-fi, but the way you described it is so beautiful, I'd love to better under the complete richness and beauty of the human experience from both sides, even if only temporarily.
I'm sure the world would be a better place if all had the chance to experience both sides and then chose.
It’s not to be done lightly and I spent 18 months thinking about it before I started HRT, but it sounds like something you might want to consider! I never had strong feelings of being trans, it was something that just started to make sense to me more and more.
Anyway either way you’re right I think it’s a pretty neat experience!
Apologies for what may be perceived as everybody jumping on you.
It’s also helping me understand women more.
I disagree. I think you're understanding your own experience more, but then you've trying to fit that to what you see or hear about from women based on a lot of assumptions that probably aren't valid.
Since we have no direct access to the internal mental state of others (and scarcely that of ourselves sometimes!) we can never be sure that we're experiencing what others are. There's a millennia-old thought experiment about imaging how we each experience the color red. How can I know that what you experience when you see an apple or a fire engine is anything like what I experience? If we could stimulate the same neurons in the optic nerve or in the various brain structures, would we each understand the stimulus as "red"? And I think that modern observations of phenomenon like synesthesia suggest that our internal qualia really do differ a lot.
That leads me to believe that it's wrong to think that hormones have changed you to experiencing things "the way a woman would", and more strongly, I'm skeptical that there's any set of qualia that can be placed in a bucket as how a woman experiences the world - I think it's absolutely individual.
(this also, by the way, makes me question how anyone can believe that their internal experience more closely matches "being a man" or "being a woman")
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The biggest thing that helped me understand women was when I changed my hormone dose and added progesterone two months ago. The subsequent few weeks were a roller coaster for me. I had a short temper, was irritable, and couldn’t control my emotional responses. My therapist said “you sound like a pregnant woman”. (I’m not saying it’s the same, just pointing out that this is something my therapist said.)
I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles, which have increased in intensity in the last two years due to perimenopause. We met this year so it’s all I’ve known.
Once a month they get really irritable, have a short fuse, and a harder time controlling their emotions. (I’m not putting this on them, they’ve been telling me about it as we have to plan our dates properly during this time.) Their emotional response to their period is more pronounced than anyone I’ve dated, probably because they’re in perimenopause.
I never fully understood the extent to which emotional regulation became difficult until I suddenly added progesterone to my body. Then I experienced a similar moodiness due to a change in hormones.
What I came to understand was how strong these changes can be in women. I now realize that for some women their period can be really intense, and they really can have a genuinely hard time with certain things. Exactly like I would if I was going through that.
So one thing I understand better is how hormonal fluctuations can change your body and your mind. When I first met my partner I didn’t understand the extent to which things would get difficult for them during their cycle. Then I started taking progesterone and I experienced strong emotional swings. It “clicked” for me how bad it can get for my partner.
The other thing is that women just make more sense to me, just in conversation. It’s hard to describe but things click more than they used to. You can never fully understand another person, but the point of conversation is to communicate complex ideas and mental states to others. I find that easier now than it was. Sorry that’s subjective but it’s funny actually it seems like women are more likely to believe someone’s subjective experience without interrogating it and demanding it get resolved to some factual kernel hah.
I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles
At first I thought you were saying that all three of them - mom and kids - have strong cycles. That makes sense, since it's known that women living in close company can synchronize their cycles, but your later discussion makes that sound really weird.
After a few re-reads, I realize that it's a pronoun problem. Your use of the plural pronoun made your comments rather more difficult for me to read.
I think at least some part of the effect for you is placebo for sure. I'm sure not all of it or even the most of it.
My wife has lower then normal for women testosterone levels, but she always have been a bit less girly then other females (in behavior, not looks). She felt for example that she had little to no maternal instincts after giving birth to our child.
What basis do you have for making these assumptions?
It seems rather unscientific to make such baseless claims about a very specialised area most people don't have knowledge of, and mentioning anecdotes about your wife is totally irrelevant...
It's not a very well-designed experiment. Aside from changing hormone levels, there's a slew of other variables: Relief at having achieved their transition, aging and maturation, actual memory of past feelings and experiences, and so on. Further, simply using one's self-reported perceptions doesn't provide a very secure footing for a serious result. Sure, use it to drive curiosity and do further experiments. But don't believe your deriving too much "truth" at this point.
I'm immensely skeptical of anything self-reported. I don't want to invalidate other's feelings, but we constantly hallucinate firm, certain seeming memories and emotions into existence with barely any suggestion. Unless you double blind test HRT there is no way of knowing if it is not entirely socially conditioned. Trans women don't have the same hormonal cycles as women, and I don't thing there's anything inherently feminine about knitting.
Well I wouldn’t say placebo, but some things like an interest in sewing and cooking may be more due to the fact that I’m making a lot of changes in my life and I’m interested in trying new things.
However testosterone and estrogen (and progesterone) pretty seriously affect the mind. There are very real effects beyond just placebo.
I've done a ton of reading and personal experimentation on this topic and I think your account was fairly spot on honestly.
Higher levels of estrogen do generally make emotions feel more intense and lower levels of testosterone generally would make someone less likely to engage in a conflict.
Hormones don't really change your core personality though. I dbout someone would become less interested in something like tech because of a change in hormone levels. However, you might be more likely to pursue emotionally fulfilling careers and hobbies in the future, and I think in arrogate this could be what accounts for some of the sex differences we see in male / female career paths. As you mentioned, estrogen make emotions more intense and it seems likely to me that this might in part explain why women seem to enjoy social careers more - perhaps because they provide more emotional stimulus.
Neonatal levels of hormones probably have a larger role in shaping our core personalities though. One example of this would autism spectrum disorders which tends to make people more interested in "things". There is now some evidence that autism is a product of irregular hormones levels during development.
What? Of course maternal instincts exist and are distinct. The differences in reproduction are the most fundamental basis of sex differentiation in animals.
In some mammals, fathers have literally no contact with their offspring while mothers care for them for years (eg, bears). In others, the mother and father both remain as part of a pack, but the mother does all of the direct care and the father is doing hunting or protection. In some, the father may have a minimal role in early life but then become more involved later as their offspring learn to hunt or fight.
The social construct of both parents having equal and identical roles in parenting at all stages of child development is very new and very culturally unique to Western, industrialized and affluent societies. Across all primates and all evidence of pre-industrial humans, maternal and paternal roles were very different.
Actually, there are many species who share the burden of child rearing equally. It is often a matter of resource availability, if food is scarce, males become aggressive and patriarchal structures emerge more prominently, and vice versa. Human history has been harsh, so it is not surprising that our ancestors tended to that type of society.
So, it is simply not true “across all” anything. I will forego badly parroting what actual experts say, so instead I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on this in his biology courses at Stanford. They’re available on YouTube.
I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious.
My position here, to be clear, is that there are gender differences in personality and phenotype, but they are mostly inconsequential for child rearing in a resource-rich society, ie, both genders are equally competent parents. Individual variation outweighs gender differences.
> I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious
Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins.
If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,000 years humans have been around, no mother was pumping breastmilk and sticking it in the refrigerator so that the father could do the 4am feeding.
Your comment is essentially putting a causal arrow backwards. Biology and nature would have us behaving in far more strongly differentiated gender roles. Contemporary western social norms and modern technology allow us to go against that nature. "Maternal instincts" are as real and fundamental as any other survival instinct humans or any other animal experience.
”We’re basically monkeys” is a bad argument when monkeys share child rearing duties IF they have resource abundance, as do other animal species. Pair bonding is a term to search for here, this is a really well-studied question. I again don’t want to parrot experts badly. Sapolsky is again a great popsci level resource here. Interestingly, parental investment is also correlated with long reproductive cycles such as humans. It makes sense I guess.
But please don’t let “human is just smart monke” turn into some naturalist fallacy wherein men must be manly because we were made so. We weren’t, but given a stressful environment, we CAN turn out that way.
> I've also started experiencing monthly cycles where for about one week a month I feel more tired and weepy like I could cry very easily
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. In women, the periodic mood changes happen during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and coincide with the rise in progesterone that is triggered by ovulation.
Males don't have ovaries, so do not ovulate, and thus cannot experience the menstrual process that causes such periodic symptoms.
I think you're seeing this pattern because you want to, not because it has any underlying periodic hormonal cause.
I agree with this, although I suspect most of what Taylor reports is true and not "placebo", as it matches other reporting from people who are chemically transitioning.
The "monthly cycle" thing is not usually reported.
Not that I'm saying that isn't truly your experience :)
> I agree with this, although I suspect most of what Taylor reports is true and not "placebo", as it matches other reporting from people who are chemically transitioning.
Certainly I do not doubt that they have recently started enjoying romantic comedies, human interest stories, sewing, cooking and not getting into arguments about racism, but I am skeptical that these are caused by externally-induced hormonal changes, rather than correlating as part of a broader set of intentional gender-transitional changes.
It is well documented that hormone levels affect activation patterns [1-5], so I am not sure why you are skeptical about it. Using references from another commenter.
Sorry but, pasting in five citations of papers you've not read, from another commenter who probably just grabbed the first five they stumbled across from searching PubMed, doesn't really add to the discussion.
Also, the first paper is written in Croatian and the second in Spanish, so it seems odd to link these on an English language forum. The odds of finding someone who understands all three languages well enough to discuss these researchers' work with you is, most likely, extremely low.
You can take a look at the abstract and then look for related articles in English.
You are dismissing articles that contradict your beliefs on the basis of lacking the capacity to read them, not of their content.
No comment on the other 3 references, thus that response does not contribute to the discussion, except for showing that you do not care about reaching some truth. But then again that account is only a few minutes old.
It is not my responsibility to fill in the blanks of what you want your argument to be.
If you would like to make a point about why you believe that enjoying romantic comedies, sewing, cooking, etc. are driven by hormonal changes rather than some other factor, please lay out your case.
Citing a random selection of papers that you haven't read does not help to achieve this. It just gives the impression that your viewpoint is not a seriously considered one.
My claim WAS that hormones affect activation patterns. That is a well supported claim.
Changes in activation patterns affect our perceptions, our senses, and literally the medium by which we experience the world. They may not affect our personality instantaneously, but our personality is malleable, and depending on feedback, it changes.
If our brain's activation patterns change s.t. certain things are more enjoyable, then these new patterns integrate in our personality.
It depends on the method of administration of HRT, some methods do show fluctuations similar to those of cis women, e.g. estradiol valerate/enanthate etc.
If they are getting monthly depot injections, that could make sense. But then the periodic mood changes as described would be a function of the frequency of administration of such hormome medication, rather than of taking it in general.
I also note the part about "I’ve felt like my emotions have gotten stronger except for anger."
So far as I'm aware, there's zero evidence that women's emotions are stronger (what would that even mean?), and certainly not that while the other emotions are stronger, anger is excepted. I'm pretty certain that women experience anger just as strongly as men.
As mentioned down-thread, this could be placebo. But there are also lots of other potential explanations, ranging from the simple passage of time, maturation, and aging, to immense relief at having achieved their transition, and so on.
It’s a strong claim to suggest no evidence exists. Transgender people commonly claim certain emotions change, with some getting stronger and some smoothing out.
For my part, I had a sharp change two months ago when my estrogen dosage increased and we added progesterone to my routine. (One effect of these meds was to reduce my testosterone levels.) So that was not an aging or maturation related change because it happened in a month. I found it easier to cry and harder to get angry.
Transfeminine people having monthly cycles is something that a lot of people have discussed, so I’m inclined to believe the phenomenon is real. I do seem to have a slow week once a month. It’s my partner who has normal periods once a month who has suggested I am cycling. I can’t say for sure what’s going on. There’s a lot of stuff about trans people that isn’t well studied. I do take progesterone but my dose is constant, so either my body processes it in cycles, or something else is happening, or its coincidence.
> It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people.
Well, there’s now a conflict of rights between sex-based and gender-based identities.
When you say “It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this,” you’re expressing a kind of euphoria [1] over becoming more feminine, but to many female people being feminine isn’t particularly what they want to be or to them what makes someone a woman - a woman is just an individual who happens to be female.
[1] “the experience of pleasure or excitement and intense feelings of well-being and happiness”.
I’ve no problem with people who wish to live in what’s called ‘a gender non-conforming way’ but I do have issue with the view that (for example) “To be identified as woman one must conform to one of a subset of appropriate genders”.
Here’s a thought experiment - if typical female people started behaving more like your father, brother, uncle etc now act - if as a social change the ‘gender’ associated with females became masculine - would you still identify as a woman?
> Well, there’s now a conflict of rights between sex-based and gender-based identities.
Nothing in your post supports, or is even suggestive of, any such “conflict of rights”.
At most, it demonstrates a conflict of preferences for how gender is ascribed to other people with other people's gender identity, but imposing gender on other people is not a right.
I think they're alluding to the conflict over whether the various different types of sex-segregated spaces should be kept as-is, be separated by gender identity instead, or have any such restrictions removed entirely to become gender neutral.
Well I’m non-binary and gender-fluid, so I don’t identify as a woman. But what I meant was “it’s amazing we can take cross sex hormones and safely change our bodies.” So I wasn’t talking about sex or gender, just HRT specifically. My suggestion that “more people do this” was referring to the concept of HRT, whether that’s taking masculinizing or feminizing hormones. I just find the process fascinating and beautiful. And when I say I hope more people do it, I mean people who want to do it.
So I apologize but your questions don’t really fit with what I meant. I don’t personally like the idea of rigid gender roles.
> It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people
The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.
If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagreement. If we all agree on something then we have nothing to tolerate. Tolerance is really the act of people accepting that some men want to live their lives like women without actually believing themselves that these men are women. That is tolerance and therefore anyone should be allowed to hold the opinion that trans women are not women but that’s okay because we’re still cool in calling you a female name and complimenting you if you wear a nice dress.
It’s like with religion. It’s perfectly fine to tell a hardcore christian person that you think god doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make you a bigot, just a human being with an opinion. As long as we still let people live their own experiences without fear or discrimination then we don’t all have to believe in the same god. It’s the same about gender ideology. The trans community needs to accept that only because they feel they are something that it doesn’t mean everyone feels that way about them. The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.
> The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.
But if you deep down inside hold the belief that transgenderism is "a mental health condition" wouldn't you want to "help" those individuals that you believe are suffering from a disease by telling them that they are sick and need help/treatment?
The dysphoria of feeling like you're in the wrong body is the mental illness, there currently is no fix for this except for transition. All outcomes improve by social transition with family support, notably outcomes do not improve by telling transgender people that they're mentally ill and that they must accept their gender assigned at birth.
Being transgender alone does not constitute a mental health condition. Dysphoria is the culprit. If people could transition at will The Culture style there would be zero confusion on this point.
This argument, that it’s the trans community that is intolerant and not those who don’t fully accept trans gender identities as legitimate, is simplistic and in bad faith.
The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.
The classic examples of these are bathrooms and athletics. Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. It sure feels like intolerance when this choice is denied from trans people.
I don’t know your own personal views, but it’s certainly not the case that “the vast majority of people” are aligned with trans people on the above issues.
> Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity.
I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.
There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.
It seems to me that the only fair way to let trans and cis athletes compete on level ground on the same event is to have a competition that completely ignores both sex and gender.
> There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female
This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations based on center of mass things afaik. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? Martial arts have categories based on weight, why shouldn't we have categories based on arm-length or blood volume? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.
Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm playing as an amateur, that is for entertainment and for the art of it, which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.
I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issues of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.
>The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete.
No, actually the reason is that it makes both watching and competing more interesting. A competition where women never got anywhere near first place would mean women would simply stop showing up (or vice versa). A boxing championship with no weight classes would mean no lightweight boxers would sign up.
On the other hand, with enough subcategories you can get to the point where some competitors win by default, or where you have championships of one or two matches.
So no, it's not arbitrary to separate competitors by some physical characteristics and not others. There are practical reasons to do so that are unrelated to the whims of organizers.
From a practical point of view, how do you imagine this playing out?
If we remove the gender division from, say, javelin throwing (random choice; current difference in world records there is currently 30% for reference). Now there won't be any (cis) women competing at the top level any more.
So somebody goes ahead and creates a women's division (or whatever you want to call it). Should we somehow forbid this? Or would it be required that they accept any transgender individual in any state of transition? And either case is just "back to square 1" - no cis women have a chance. I don't see how "let's remove the 'women' category in this competition in the interest of fairness to trans people" is improving things for anyone...
>The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.
This is an interesting one.
I definitely find being told I have to accept that "trans women are women" off putting and like the Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun, it feels like the wind blowing and makes me want to hold on to that jacket tighter.
The way I see it, trans women are trans women, and trans men are trans men. They occupy a different category in my mind than either.
I'm trying to imagine how I would feel going to either bathroom as a trans person, and the only answer I can come up with is "riddled with anxiety".
> Attacking people on these two points will be an attack that is almost exclusively on women, and society doesn't tolerate that.
Given the prevalence of sexual violence in our society and the difficulty of getting an appropriate response, I find this statement incredibly ironic. (Out of context, I admit, but it's hard to reconcile the two views.)
#MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
[1] No citations - live your own life, do your own reading, make your own conclusions.
> Given the prevalence of sexual violence in our society and the difficulty of getting an appropriate response, I find this statement incredibly ironic. (Out of context, I admit, but it's hard to reconcile the two views.)
>
> #MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
Isn't that evidence that society doesn't tolerate these things? Once it was out in the open, society rushed to condemn it. Everywhere. Everyone.
It could only happen when society did not know about it. When it was kept secret.
Society absolutely does not tolerate attacks on women, as the #MeToo movement showed.
> The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.
Who says so? What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"? If you're seeing it through the polarized lens of online (specifically big platforms) interaction, then for sure you are seeing it as intolerant. But the same could be said about almost every pov online: most of what we get to see widely is vocal, shallow, unsubstantiated takes. Because that's what get viral.
So for one, there is no such thing as a "transgender community". There are most surely publicized simplified canons of what a transgender person is like, just like there is for "the average white dude", "the academic leftist", "the trump fan" or "the new age craftsy person". The thing is, there are very few person actually like that and the one that are, are usually like that because of tremendous influence of online platforms on their views.
All in all, with all respect, i think you are fighting a strawman. Personally, my course of action in this matter (shallowness, simplifications and argumentative intolerance getting more widespread) is not to fight against it for people you disagree with, because they for sure won't listen to you, but to fight against it for people you actually agree with. This is the thing: in every of these "communities" you describe (transgender, religious, could be anything) there is actually little internal cohesion and there are different political ideals interacting. I prefer to put my own house in order. In fact that's the only thing i can meaningfully impact.
> What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"?
I am a lesbian woman and in a gay dating app I have been receiving dozens of death threats and I was even banned after I got reported by a group of people because I put this sentence in those exact words in my profile:
“I support LGBTQ+ rights and I am a proud member of this wonderfully vibrant community. I welcome all transgender people and count many as my friends. However, without causing anyone upset I would like to state that I am only interested in dating female bodied women and I would kindly ask everyone to respect my sexual preferences.”
I’ve been a lesbian for 39 years and I never felt this hated and attacked by any other group of people. I am not saying that transgender people attack me, but it’s transgender activists (often men who identify as men) who say the most vile and nasty things to me because of my sexual preference which I tried to express in the most respectful way.
> The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.
I doubt that is the main reason. Society has been pretty clear for a long time that certain people found trans people too strange to accept them. Gay people have been treated the same way. I think most people that don’t like trans people are probably also uncomfortable with gay people even if they are more likely to say it’s okay to be gay.
> If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot.
You can avoid being called a bigot by understanding the following basic concepts.
Sex and gender are two distinct ideas. Gender as described by Judith Butler is a kind of performance that you do. It starts in childhood where we give boys the color blue and toy trucks and we give girls the color pink and dolls. Men wear pants and never wear dresses and women wear dresses and skits and use a purse. A man never wears a purse and if he has anything close it’s called a bag, definitely not a purse.
The above are made up concepts. Clothes and bags and pink and blue are not biological reality, they’re just made up by society. They’re part of a performance of gender. You can change your gender just by changing your performance.
Sex is a biological concept that relates to what secondary sex characteristics your body presents. Hormone levels, genitals, etc. this is still don’t a binary concept as intersex people exist and are something like 1% of the population. It’s also unclear if someone completely changes their hormones and has surgery to change their genitals, what is the point of saying “you’re still a man”? Such a statement is likely to bring up feelings of pain and misery the person has had from people who have been intolerant towards them. It also is unclear if you’re referring to biological sex or gender, and trans people are often terrified that they’re not performing their gender properly.
It’s like going up to a fat person and saying “wow you’re fat” and then walking around saying “fat people are intolerant because they get upset when I call them fat”. Maybe on some level you’re right, but you’re being an asshole if you insist on saying that. And again, if a trans person has severely changed their sex hormones, the concept of “sex never changes” is shaky anyway.
So stop trying to tell trans women they’re really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.
You expressed incredulity that someone would define men/women in a reductive way (they didn't by the way, you missed their point) and then in the very next paragraph demonstrated that you have an extraordinarily reductive view of what defines a 'man'.
We get it. You think sex and gender are the same thing, and have very narrow views on how they're defined and a woeful lack of acknowledgement that there's even a sliver of complexity here.
But you're not even trying to argue this or convince anyone of anything. You're just saying "nuh huh. What I believe in true and applies to everyone whether they like it or not".
I'm guessing there's nothing out there that'll change your mind. You've taken a fundamentalist position, which begs the question why are you here?
I’ve noticed that you’ve failed to take to heart the one main thing that I said can avoid this issue for you: an understanding that sex and gender are different concepts.
What clothes you wear are part of a performance where the entirety of the performance represents your gender. But not your sex! Changing one thing doesn’t change your gender. But if you change the whole performance, that’s changing your gender. And I don’t really like these concepts of gender, but it’s more of a description of how society views a person. I never got called “ma'am” or “miss” until I started wearing dresses. I’m not really saying that wearing a dress makes you a woman, but I’m saying that wearing a dress and doing the other things makes other people read you as a woman.
Until you’re able to separate the two concepts of sex and gender in your mind you’re going to continue to run in to this issue.
When someone says “trans women are women, not men” they’re talking about gender, not sex. And gender as theorized by Judith Butler is something that we can easily change. Whether we can change sex is a different question and one I’m less qualified to discuss, but it’s irrelevant to the question of changing gender.
I disagree. If a man attempts to masquerade as a woman, and someone is led to believe that he is a woman, that doesn't make him a woman. It just means his pretence managed to fool someone into believing this. Behind this facade, he is still a man.
Also I'm not convinced that a man being called "ma'am" or "miss" necessarily means that the speaker thinks he's a woman, especially these days. They might be saying it because that's how you're expected to politely address men in dresses these days. Or perhaps, they are being quietly sarcastic about the whole thing.
In summary, I don't accept this Butlerian redefinition of woman, as it's incoherent with reality and relies on guessing what's going on in people's minds. The existing definition of adult human female is fine and there's no need to change it.
> I hope that more people do this and share the experience. Everyone needs to hear this story.
Surely you meant people who desire to transition? If I could have that experience in a completely temporary way without messing up my hormones, I might. But I like being a man and don’t want to mess up my health just to experience that. It’s not the same as recommending more people try meditation or volunteering with disabled children. Those things can change your worldview without totally altering your body chemistry.
It’s great that you want to do this and are able to. But I think most people don’t want to.
Men: it's ok for you to sew, cook, cry, appreciate beauty etc. You don't need to take HRT to experience it. You just need to ignore the macho expectations that some people have of you. End transmission.
No. I'm saying that some men live in social groups that think these are women's activities. I'm saying that they're not, so if you're a man and you want to sew, have at it. And of course that means that sewing won't make you understand women. A lot of women can't sew.
So.... what does your reply have to do with what GP has said? He simply stated he doesn't want to risk his health in order to better understand how "women think" by taking potentially life-altering drugd. I'd wager to better understand women you should actually spend time with them and talk to them, not engage in random activities that you yourself said aren't indicative of a certain sex
I was going to write a reply to the same comment then I saw yours and you said it better than I could.
In my experience, the best way to understand how women experience the world is just as you said: spend time with them, talk to them, and - most importantly - listen to them. I think many men could benefit from having more female friends (and I mean truly friends, not secretly trying to get in their pants).
I've learned so much about how differently women experience the world just from befriending many women over the years. It's really opened my eyes to how differently women might experience the same situation. It's amazing how different society treats women and it can be totally invisible to men unless you're willing to look for it. I think it's made me a better husband and father as well.
Yes I meant I hope more people who want to transition try it. As society accepts trans people, and access to appropriate medical care becomes more widespread, more people will do it. You need only watch the latest Philosophy Tube video on the British health care system to understand that there are people who want to transition and aren’t able to access the medical care they need. And then there are people who would be more likely to consider it if they lived in a more accepting place. I’ve realized I would have appreciated transition much sooner in life (I started at 37) if the option had seemed more realistic when I was younger.
Your monthly cycle is odd! In females who ovulate on a monthly cycle, hormone levels change throughout the month because of ovulation, and that's what causes mood changes (and other stuff too - my wife drops stuff a lot right around ovulation). But if you're taking hormones, aren't they in the form of daily pills or wearable patches? There wouldn't be much variance in hormone levels with HRT, or if there is, there's no mechanism for them to be monthly. What do you think causes your monthly cycle?
Edit: sorry, I sorted writing this a while ago while making tea, none of the other responses were there, and now that I've posted it I see a whole bunch of people making similar points. Sorry.
Something completely different than hormones, but on drugs I've also found to have a very different outlook on life, situations, emotions, thoughts, relationships. While the recreational side of it was a lot of fun, it was also pretty confronting to better see how we're just a bunch of lizard brains controlled by our chemicals. On the other hand I think it's made me a little bit more forgiving and less judgemental about others, as there's not as much agency in our behaviour as we think.
> This article is saying that the differences are sexual, not due to gender.
No, it doesn't. It says that there are striking differences in the distribution of personality traits between the sexes, and does not take a stand on the source, besides that it is “certainly” a mix of biological and social contributions.
As gender identity, in the current population, correlates very strongly to “sex” [0] (less than 2% of the adult population reports a transgender, nonbinary, or other identity divergent from their “sex” assigned at birth), any strong gender-based personality difference would also be associated with sex, and vice versa.
[0] a misnomer for what is more accurately an externally-ascribed gender; biological sex is multidimensional, the binary division of “sex” by a subset of sex traits is an imposed social construct.
As a warning, this page spends multiple pages teaching you about their gender findings before giving you your results. I had to go through 20+ pages of teaching before getting a prediction on my gender.
And they make value judgements on the results they don't seem to like:
"The biggest correlation we found between gender and any one personality trait was r=0.42, which means that gender explains 18% of the variability in that trait. Another way to put this is... if you knew a random person's score on that one personality trait, and you tried to guess that person's gender using just that score, you'd mispredict that person's gender 31% of the time!"
They think that's low! That's crazy high for just one trait, it would be called "Highly significant" in any paper.
Is there anything in real life which you divide in two groups you wouldn’t get differences in some metrics on average? I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.
Well, but what this article is stating, is that those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with.
Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex. And also, the article didn’t state anything about gender. There is a specific footnote about this.
You probably just met someone from a non-English culture. The sex/gender distinction is an invention of the past 20 years, and outside of the English world has probably only been picked up by people who interface with English speakers a lot (i.e. academics). I can assure you that Korean makes no distinction: the dictionary translations of the English terms are "sex" and (the full phrase) "one's feeling of one's sex."
That's how the terms sex and gender were used in English until a couple of decades ago. Gender was later coopted to refer to social and cultural factors, as opposed to biological factors, of sex.
> The sex/gender distinction is an invention of the past 20 years
As a generalized concept (though descriptions of social systems with gender roles distinct from the commonly referenced sex binary are older still, though many of those written by members of societies which did not recognize such a distinctions, including Western European colonialists, were hampered by the absence of terminology to describe it simply) its significantly older than 20 years; with research projects and prominent works on gender identity, in the modern sense, being written as early as the 1950s and 1960s. While the bulk of the writing that early (and for some time after) on the subject pathologized identities that diverged from the social sex/gender correspondence stereotypes, it recognized that they existed, were largely a product of aspects of biology, and while they tended to held out that there was a social contribution to them which made them potentially malleable early on (and advised conversion therapy for that purpose), recognized that they were difficult to impossible to modify beyond early childhood, and in many cases recognized the value of gender confirming procedures beyond that point.
You may have misinderstood, and I also oversimplified. The word "sex" is translated by the main online Korean-English dictionary as 성, the local pronounciation for the classical chinese character for the category of sex, or 성별, which translates back into English again as "sex".
The word "gender" is also translated as 성별, and also has an entry for [grammar] 성 구분, or the grammatical difference between sexes.
However the entry under "gender dysphoria" is "feeling that one's birth sex is not one's sex." So the social role idea is totally missing from the Korean-English dictionary.
The Korean-only dictionary has an entry, however, for 젠더 "jendeo," which is the imported modern Western concept of gender with all its academic usages explained in detail.
The vast majority of human cultures across time and space don’t recognize gender in the sense you do. There’s sex, roles, personality, trends, etc but the concept of a man identifying as a woman and vice versa is a very rare one. There are European countries (most recently Switzerland) that outright reject these notions, and they were almost unheard of in the US just a mere decade ago.
What seems like basic reality to you is an American fad to most everyone else.
I think you misunderstood me - OP wrote he doesn't have a concept of sex where he comes from. Since that's the biological term it sounded funny to me. I'm sure he meant to say gender.
What ruszki wrote was "where I come from, this notion is basically non-existent". It's ambiguous whether "this notion" refers to sex, gender, or the distinction between the two, but since both sex and gender are human universals, you should have inferred that "this notion" referred to the distinction.
Those are two different and somewhat unrelated statements. First, "this notion" is unknown to them. Second, that they previously meant "sex". What does the second statement mean? Let's look at it in context:
-I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.
-those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with
-Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex.
ruszki's comment expressed more verbosely would be:
> This idea that sex and gender are distinguishable does not exist where I come from. Previously when I said "women and men" I was referring to the sexes, not to the genders. That is to say, to me "man" and "human male" are synonymous, as are "woman" and "human female".
You had all the information necessary to interpret what was written charitable, but instead for some reason you decided to interpret it as if they were saying something nonsensical.
It’s saying these differences are connected to sex, but it’s not saying they’re not connected gender. Didn’t the article say that research hasn’t been done?
It would be interesting to see whether these differences were more or less correlated with gender rather than sex.
It would also be interesting to see what differences there are between trans and cis men/women, and whether/how these change as a trans person transitions.
For the vast majority of the population that isn't actually concerned with that and is happy to conflate the two, doing so will produce a useful enough result given the two are synonymous enough of the time that the person isn't at risk of drawing a conclusion that maybe doesn't hold true because they forgot to consider the edge cases.
I thought that I should have made a note about this in my comment, but I didn’t because the author declares that the article isn’t about the cause of these differences, or whether these are inherent differences. That’s why it’s strange for me. I think the discussion is about the inherent nature of these, and not whether these exist.
Western society has made a huge push for more women in specific industries. The impetus being discrimination against women has resulted in them being under represented.
The only way the above is logical is if there are no inherent differences between men and women. Otherwise, we have no way of determining how much disparity is from inherent factors and how much is from environmental. Put another way: if you believe female (or any race) under representation is caused by discrimination you should be able to define the correct level of representation if there was no discrimination (I have yet to see this number defined in any instance, which is concerning because there’s no way to measure impact or progress).
Given that we’re broadly implementing much policies is strong evidence that many believe there are no inherent differences.
Because we don't want to blame our wonderful education system and society. Why is very hard to find little boy clothes in other color than blue and little girls clothes in other color than pink ?
Our eyes lie all the time and experience is wide open to interpretation. That's why we have science so we can objectively and progressively determine what is true and what is not.
Relying on our gut like our ancestors, who for example believed in the obvious reality of witches, is the best way to be ignorant of what is really true.
This is not a good faith argument. Nobody needed nutritional science to tell them a malnourished mule didn't do mule things very well, physics to tell them water flowed downhill, etc. People of the past believed in witches and superstition for things their senses, experiences and intuition could not explain. Likewise the achievements in science have mostly been in explaining what we can't observe with human hardware. For example replacing miasma theory with germ theory, understanding and harnessing electromagnetism, etc.
Witches were and are real. I know some personally. You may be refering to their alleged supernatural abilities, which are no more real or unreal than the prayers and rituals of any other religion. Some of the greatest scientists of all time were also alchemists and spiritualists, borderline witchcraft imho.
There are people who call themselves witches... but witches in the sense of women who have made a pact with Satan in exchange for supernatural powers are not real.
Indeed, if they were real, we would be quite correct to persecute them.
And those that did in reality make such pacts? Whether Satan exists is irrelevant. There have been many witches throughout history who knowingly made pacts and believed themselves to have powers. Alison Device is the classic. She cursed a man. That man heard her curse and almost immediately had what we today would call a stroke, likely in part induced by the panic/fear of that curse. She believed she had powers. He believed she had powers. She exercised those powers and a man died. Call it a placebo effect if you want, but she was a witch who proved able to kill a man with a curse.
Science is a tool to explain mechanisms of the natural of world. It can NOT be used to find the truth about objective morality.
For example I can point you the the hordes of research papers done on the effects of alcohol. The source of cancers, 40-50% of violent crimes are done under the influence of alcohol, predisposition to evils such as gambling, assualts, SA, domestic abuse, drink driving, effects on mental and physical health and much much more. Truly an endless well of evil that stems from this substance. It has been explicitly verified with the scientific method that it carries significant harms that outweigh any so called benifits.
Yet I can guarantee almost all people who assert science as the only way to truth and morality, promote alchol consumption despite the very clear studies backed by research on the depravity of alcohol with regards to the individual and society.
So as much as science can say something is bad, the people who say science is the only way to truth need to be consistent and onboard its conclusions rather than picking and choosing moral boundaries when convenient.
Science is definetly not the only tool for validating reality.
Testimony is an integral part of all of our lives for ascertaining truth. We know that the country of Japan exists because we have maps and images of the place and geography teachers have testified that "this is Japan". It you really think about it, most of your entire life for knowing the truth is testimony. How many times do people pull out their microscope and scientific instruments to verify the world around them using the scientific method? We can even take a step further to say that we use testimony of scientists through their research papers to gain truth and understanding of a matter without having to peer review their papers.
Essentially we can assign high probability something is the truth with testimonials of individuals.
In regards to our ancestors it would be incredible to be dismissive of their experience and testimonies regarding the "supernatural". How is it possible that civilization all across the globe without contact have some sort of ghosts, spirits, demons, Jinns in their world view. Why do we discard their testimony instead on saying what is the probability that civilization without contact all have belief in a super natural entities?
> How is it possible that civilization all across the globe without contact have some sort of ghosts, spirits, demons, Jinns in their world view.
This is an argument from incredulity, a common logical fallacy.
The consensus (across many scientific disciplines) is that our brains are more "buggy"than we realize. We routinely fall for biases, fallacies, superstitions, mass hysterias/hallucinations and other silly behaviour.
We're intellectually sophisticated compared to our ancestors. Yet, many of our contemporaries still "see" ghosts. "The Believing Brain" by Michael Shermer is a very approachable intro to the topic of how this phenomenon came about and why it persists.
> How many times do people pull out their microscope and scientific instruments to verify the world around them using the scientific method
It's a regular occurrence in schools around me. YMMV
> Essentially we can assign high probability something is the truth with testimonials of individuals.
This statement is another example of fallacious logic (specifically, argumentum ad populum).
The business of truth is not a democracy.
> Why do we discard their testimony instead on saying what is the probability that civilization without contact all have belief in a super natural entities?
Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Taking sex differences in personality seriously involves taking the reality seriously that women are treated radically differently than men in almost every society on earth, and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence.
These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to believe that if I raise one mouse in a dark 6 in^3 wooden box, and let another mouse run free (or even in a different kind of box), that at the end of that process I should still have two identical mice. The fact that men and women have different personalities and cultures is no more necessarily genetic than the fact that the English and the French speak entirely different languages.
I remember the day that my 3 year old son took his Elsa doll to Kindergarten. I don't know what they said to him, but after that day he declared his favorite color is now black and he no longer wanted the doll.
I'm sure there are some genetic sex differences, but looking at the huge difference in how society treats kids from the youngest age on, I'm going to say it's very hard to differentiate between genetic vs. society.
Your above exercise is silly because it doesn’t control for genetics. How can you run a robust experiment without accounting for major confounds?
Even more we don’t even remotely understand how those confounds work - much less be able to control for them. This is why most psych / sociological experiments are weak.
That's a very one-dimensional analysis of a complex problem. You can't ignore the obvious physical differences and roles in reproduction. These factors affect how you relate to a larger society and to what extent you depend on it.
The problem is not of one isolated mouse but a society of mice and how your physical size, vulnerability (men don't have period pains or pregnancies) affect how you relate to society and thus your personality.
Yes, although our instinct to raise boys and girls differently is itself genetically programmed. Which is why all human societies do it, as well as all primates. So the origin of the difference is genetic, even if some of its influence is mediated through culture.
The question of how genetics causes us to mold our children according to gender norms might be at least as interesting as the question of how genetics directly influences preferences.
There is so many things to comment here on. There are important social problem with gender roles, but we should also recognize what the problems area are and where they aren't.
Women are not a permanent lower caste. In term of their social status (and social economic status) their median are similar, even slightly higher than men. Their variance is much smaller, with few women at the very high and and very few at the very bottom. This difference in variance do causes problem for society but the fixes are less obvious than in cast societies where one demographic fully dominate the bottom of society. When looking at household social status, women have much higher in average social status than men (for the above reasons).
Women are also not victims of violence more men. The opposite is true. Men are much more likely victim of violence then women. Women are much less likely however to be perpetrators of violence towards men. In term of behavior there is also the slightly less known fact that in domestic context, violence from a man to a woman, man towards an other man, and woman towards an other woman is identical in violent domestic disputes per household. This is why the full title of those reports tend to be called "men's violence again women and violence in same sex relationships". The implication in terms of genetics is that either a person sexual preference influence violence, or women and men are equally violent but in different contexts.
(Edit: To pull down some statistics from Sweden as an example. Men are the most common recipient to need social support. Single men without children living below poverty line are more than twice the size of the next group below, which is single women without children living below poverty line. The group after that is single mothers, and the one after that are families with two married adults and at least one child.)
> and that radical difference is generally that women are a permanent lower caste, and are victims of violence far more than they are perpetrators of violence
Aren't the females of almost every first world demographic objectively better off than males in many metrics?
They experience longer life, less violence, more social services, better education, more bursaries, less injuries at work, higher median income amongst the entire population, lower sentences for crime ... and more?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadThis is what makes it trivial to break substitution ciphers given a long enough ciphertext.
There are no differences; this is not a category of any interest. Urdu is a non-western language, except of course that it is, in a global sense, very closely related to French. (Why do you think we say "Indo-European"?)
2. Ideograms.
The modern language that comes closest to using written ideograms is Japanese. But the language that comes closest to what you're probably thinking of is Mandarin Chinese, where every character is fairly rare.
You have exactly the same options that you do with any other language: you could render the text into an alphabet of interest, or you can do your analysis on the symbols the text is originally written in. That second approach will make some questions much easier; if you sample a letter and get န်, you can be certain you're not reading French.
It will make analyzing Chinese harder because character frequencies are so low. (see https://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/statistics/char/li... - the most common character in written Chinese is 的 at 4.1% of all characters; the second most common accounts for an additional 1.6% of all characters. The top 152 characters collectively account for 50% of all text.)
This will mean that codebreaking requires longer texts.† It won't have much effect on the problem of identifying the language by sampling unenciphered monograms from it; that stays easy, because the commonly used characters are highly informative even if e.g. you're comparing written Mandarin to written Cantonese. You'll probably need more samples (for an equally reliable judgment) than you would for a script that didn't have so many unique characters.
† This problem is significant. Specific content words will all be rare, and we can't really expect a message, even a very long message, to discuss every possible topic at the same frequency that the corpus of written Chinese as a whole does. Even if we could expect that, the amount of ciphertext you'd need to reliably distinguish the 3100th-most common character in this corpus (酱 [noun, 'sauce'] representing 0.09% of all characters) from the 2494th-most common (娶 [verb, 'to marry a woman'] representing 0.19% of all characters) would be quite large.
The mechanism is just multiplication. Suppose you have a quantity that increases by 20% every period. (Doesn't matter what the period is.) Let's start the quantity at 4 times 10 to the power of irrelevant. We'll consider the leading digit every period:
As you can see, we spend a lot more time with the amount of stuff we have being led by a 1 than we do with it being led by any other digit. Having our growth rate be less than one makes this easy to see by causing similar leading digits to occur next to each other, but the result will be the same for any growth rate.(You can see that it will be the same for any growth rate by considering that you can always match the observations of a system with the same observation period and a different growth rate by instead imagining a system with the same growth rate and a different observation period. But varying the observation period doesn't change the amount of time spent in any given quantity range.)
Inversely, the lowest order decimals tend to be evenly distributed, which is also a useful way to detect tampering (trying to make the numbers look "random" does anything but).
It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this, and I’ve learned so much from the experience. It’s hard to describe the changes precisely, but I’m finding that women make more sense to me and are more interesting to talk to, while I have a lower tolerance for men trying to act tough, which before seemed silly but now seems annoying. I’ve also found that I have less interest in action movies and recently I’ve been more interested in romantic comedies and stories of people.
At Christmas dinner my dad got really racist and previously I would have gotten very angry and probably tried to set him straight, but instead I just felt sad and upset and I calmly got up from the table and walked away to calm down.
I’ve also started experiencing monthly cycles where for about one week a month I feel more tired and weepy like I could cry very easily. I have WAY more sympathy for women who have difficult periods now, because I never actually understood the extent to which it affects them. I think now it’s unfair that we expect women to show up and work every day and perform the same, because for some women their period can be physically disabling.
I’ve felt like my emotions have gotten stronger except for anger. My other emotions like love and empathy and sadness have gotten stronger, and I also find more variation in them throughout the monthly cycle. Before, my emotions were pretty much the same every day. I mean I had ups and downs, good days and bad days, but it always sort of stayed within a certain range. Now I feel like I’m a certain way for three weeks, and then for the fourth week I have that aforementioned weepyness and stronger feelings.
It’s a real shame that people get so bent out of shape about trans people. I think it’s beautiful that we can do this. It’s helping me understand so much about a world I never quite realized was there. I remember male comedians in the 1990’s complaining about women. It was always a punchline to a cheap joke. But now through hormone therapy individuals can actually cross that line, and experience the other side. I hope that more people do this and share the experience. Everyone needs to hear this story.
Also contrary to what some people would think, I’m no less interested in engineering. I’m still designing and building an open source solar powered farming robot (see my profile) and designing circuit boards and setting up servers for fun. But I’ve also realized that stuff isn’t the only thing I want to do, and I’ve been spending more time sewing and cooking too. I think I’m developing an appreciation for more of the world and becoming a more well rounded person. I wouldn’t say everyone should do this, but it’s definitely the right thing for me. And everyone should have the right to make the same choice if they’d like.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15669543/
Depending on method of administration, changes occur sooner or later. A common one is "monotherapy" with only estrogen injections in oils which get released over time.
Do you see any possible downsides at the individual or societal level?
I don’t see any downsides to more people doing this.
The idea that there are no downsides doesn't mesh with reality.
That's what I said. "Women going incognito".
>Please back up your statements with evidence.
Spend a few days in online circles reading experiences of transmen, then do yourself another solid and spend another few days wading through online circles for men specifically. It's not too hard to see a few transitioners go "well X kinda sucked as a woman but Y definitely sucks now that I am a man".
>The fact that you liken HRT to "picking your poison" is ignorant and disingenuous
What's disingenuous is your extremely uncharitable interpretation, and I would urge you to take a step back and read with a little more favor towards the writer.
Think for a moment by bringing it back to its basis. As a woman with gender dysphoria, you have to pick between undergoing HRT and potentially having disastrous effects on your psyche, or suffering harsher consequences from your dysphoria for living as a woman.
To claim there are 'no downsides' when even the people for who the procedure exists have to pick between the lesser of two evils rather than a straight up boost, is completely off the mark. Vincent's example at least suggests women without dysphoria can't just 'live as a man for a bit' without it having downsides. Transitioners experiencing the same despite a net gain due to their unique circumstances would confirm it, more than deny it.
You fail to see that the laser focus on trans people is exactly why GP's comment doesn't mesh for the average person, as 'people who seriously desire to do this' are not necessarily people who feel uncomfortable or less comfortable with their own gender.
So please, stop making this seem like an attack on trans people. It isn't. It is merely a rebuttal against the idea that men living as women and women living as men, no further qualifiers given, only out of some 'desire to try it', has no downsides.
These drugs you are taking are no joking matter and your fortuitous lived experience doesn't make your claim less preposterous
It's a bit sci-fi, but the way you described it is so beautiful, I'd love to better under the complete richness and beauty of the human experience from both sides, even if only temporarily.
I'm sure the world would be a better place if all had the chance to experience both sides and then chose.
Anyway either way you’re right I think it’s a pretty neat experience!
It’s also helping me understand women more.
I disagree. I think you're understanding your own experience more, but then you've trying to fit that to what you see or hear about from women based on a lot of assumptions that probably aren't valid.
Since we have no direct access to the internal mental state of others (and scarcely that of ourselves sometimes!) we can never be sure that we're experiencing what others are. There's a millennia-old thought experiment about imaging how we each experience the color red. How can I know that what you experience when you see an apple or a fire engine is anything like what I experience? If we could stimulate the same neurons in the optic nerve or in the various brain structures, would we each understand the stimulus as "red"? And I think that modern observations of phenomenon like synesthesia suggest that our internal qualia really do differ a lot.
That leads me to believe that it's wrong to think that hormones have changed you to experiencing things "the way a woman would", and more strongly, I'm skeptical that there's any set of qualia that can be placed in a bucket as how a woman experiences the world - I think it's absolutely individual.
(this also, by the way, makes me question how anyone can believe that their internal experience more closely matches "being a man" or "being a woman")
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The biggest thing that helped me understand women was when I changed my hormone dose and added progesterone two months ago. The subsequent few weeks were a roller coaster for me. I had a short temper, was irritable, and couldn’t control my emotional responses. My therapist said “you sound like a pregnant woman”. (I’m not saying it’s the same, just pointing out that this is something my therapist said.)
I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles, which have increased in intensity in the last two years due to perimenopause. We met this year so it’s all I’ve known.
Once a month they get really irritable, have a short fuse, and a harder time controlling their emotions. (I’m not putting this on them, they’ve been telling me about it as we have to plan our dates properly during this time.) Their emotional response to their period is more pronounced than anyone I’ve dated, probably because they’re in perimenopause.
I never fully understood the extent to which emotional regulation became difficult until I suddenly added progesterone to my body. Then I experienced a similar moodiness due to a change in hormones.
What I came to understand was how strong these changes can be in women. I now realize that for some women their period can be really intense, and they really can have a genuinely hard time with certain things. Exactly like I would if I was going through that.
So one thing I understand better is how hormonal fluctuations can change your body and your mind. When I first met my partner I didn’t understand the extent to which things would get difficult for them during their cycle. Then I started taking progesterone and I experienced strong emotional swings. It “clicked” for me how bad it can get for my partner.
The other thing is that women just make more sense to me, just in conversation. It’s hard to describe but things click more than they used to. You can never fully understand another person, but the point of conversation is to communicate complex ideas and mental states to others. I find that easier now than it was. Sorry that’s subjective but it’s funny actually it seems like women are more likely to believe someone’s subjective experience without interrogating it and demanding it get resolved to some factual kernel hah.
I have a partner who is non-binary but AFAB, has had two kids, and is going through perimenopause. They have strong monthly cycles
At first I thought you were saying that all three of them - mom and kids - have strong cycles. That makes sense, since it's known that women living in close company can synchronize their cycles, but your later discussion makes that sound really weird.
After a few re-reads, I realize that it's a pronoun problem. Your use of the plural pronoun made your comments rather more difficult for me to read.
My wife has lower then normal for women testosterone levels, but she always have been a bit less girly then other females (in behavior, not looks). She felt for example that she had little to no maternal instincts after giving birth to our child.
It seems rather unscientific to make such baseless claims about a very specialised area most people don't have knowledge of, and mentioning anecdotes about your wife is totally irrelevant...
The other is an assumption that someone's observed characteristics are caused by one particular hormone level, with no evidence to support that.
You could attribute her height and preference for fatty fish to her T levels too, if you strained hard enough.
But this is subject to placebo effect, as the OP said, so you can't directly infer a casual influence on behaviour.
> The other is an assumption that someone's observed characteristics are caused by one particular hormone level, with no evidence to support that.
The OP did not say the lack of maternal instincts was caused by lower than normal testosterone, they simply noted that she had both characteristics.
However testosterone and estrogen (and progesterone) pretty seriously affect the mind. There are very real effects beyond just placebo.
Higher levels of estrogen do generally make emotions feel more intense and lower levels of testosterone generally would make someone less likely to engage in a conflict.
Hormones don't really change your core personality though. I dbout someone would become less interested in something like tech because of a change in hormone levels. However, you might be more likely to pursue emotionally fulfilling careers and hobbies in the future, and I think in arrogate this could be what accounts for some of the sex differences we see in male / female career paths. As you mentioned, estrogen make emotions more intense and it seems likely to me that this might in part explain why women seem to enjoy social careers more - perhaps because they provide more emotional stimulus.
Neonatal levels of hormones probably have a larger role in shaping our core personalities though. One example of this would autism spectrum disorders which tends to make people more interested in "things". There is now some evidence that autism is a product of irregular hormones levels during development.
Do “maternal instincts” exist in the first place, and how do they differ from just parental instincts?
Explaining a failure to bond with your child through gender seems very questionable to me.
In some mammals, fathers have literally no contact with their offspring while mothers care for them for years (eg, bears). In others, the mother and father both remain as part of a pack, but the mother does all of the direct care and the father is doing hunting or protection. In some, the father may have a minimal role in early life but then become more involved later as their offspring learn to hunt or fight.
The social construct of both parents having equal and identical roles in parenting at all stages of child development is very new and very culturally unique to Western, industrialized and affluent societies. Across all primates and all evidence of pre-industrial humans, maternal and paternal roles were very different.
So, it is simply not true “across all” anything. I will forego badly parroting what actual experts say, so instead I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on this in his biology courses at Stanford. They’re available on YouTube.
I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious.
My position here, to be clear, is that there are gender differences in personality and phenotype, but they are mostly inconsequential for child rearing in a resource-rich society, ie, both genders are equally competent parents. Individual variation outweighs gender differences.
Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins.
If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,000 years humans have been around, no mother was pumping breastmilk and sticking it in the refrigerator so that the father could do the 4am feeding.
Your comment is essentially putting a causal arrow backwards. Biology and nature would have us behaving in far more strongly differentiated gender roles. Contemporary western social norms and modern technology allow us to go against that nature. "Maternal instincts" are as real and fundamental as any other survival instinct humans or any other animal experience.
But please don’t let “human is just smart monke” turn into some naturalist fallacy wherein men must be manly because we were made so. We weren’t, but given a stressful environment, we CAN turn out that way.
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. In women, the periodic mood changes happen during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, and coincide with the rise in progesterone that is triggered by ovulation.
Males don't have ovaries, so do not ovulate, and thus cannot experience the menstrual process that causes such periodic symptoms.
I think you're seeing this pattern because you want to, not because it has any underlying periodic hormonal cause.
The "monthly cycle" thing is not usually reported.
Not that I'm saying that isn't truly your experience :)
Certainly I do not doubt that they have recently started enjoying romantic comedies, human interest stories, sewing, cooking and not getting into arguments about racism, but I am skeptical that these are caused by externally-induced hormonal changes, rather than correlating as part of a broader set of intentional gender-transitional changes.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19789167/
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17117339/
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25505380/
[4] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29544637/
[5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18842345/
Also, the first paper is written in Croatian and the second in Spanish, so it seems odd to link these on an English language forum. The odds of finding someone who understands all three languages well enough to discuss these researchers' work with you is, most likely, extremely low.
You are dismissing articles that contradict your beliefs on the basis of lacking the capacity to read them, not of their content.
No comment on the other 3 references, thus that response does not contribute to the discussion, except for showing that you do not care about reaching some truth. But then again that account is only a few minutes old.
If you would like to make a point about why you believe that enjoying romantic comedies, sewing, cooking, etc. are driven by hormonal changes rather than some other factor, please lay out your case.
Citing a random selection of papers that you haven't read does not help to achieve this. It just gives the impression that your viewpoint is not a seriously considered one.
Changes in activation patterns affect our perceptions, our senses, and literally the medium by which we experience the world. They may not affect our personality instantaneously, but our personality is malleable, and depending on feedback, it changes.
If our brain's activation patterns change s.t. certain things are more enjoyable, then these new patterns integrate in our personality.
If you're correct, then it's quite possible that all the other subjective feelings experienced by the poster are similar ... psychosomatic, maybe?
The placebo effect is a real thing.
So far as I'm aware, there's zero evidence that women's emotions are stronger (what would that even mean?), and certainly not that while the other emotions are stronger, anger is excepted. I'm pretty certain that women experience anger just as strongly as men.
As mentioned down-thread, this could be placebo. But there are also lots of other potential explanations, ranging from the simple passage of time, maturation, and aging, to immense relief at having achieved their transition, and so on.
For my part, I had a sharp change two months ago when my estrogen dosage increased and we added progesterone to my routine. (One effect of these meds was to reduce my testosterone levels.) So that was not an aging or maturation related change because it happened in a month. I found it easier to cry and harder to get angry.
Well, there’s now a conflict of rights between sex-based and gender-based identities.
When you say “It’s truly amazing and wonderful that we can do this,” you’re expressing a kind of euphoria [1] over becoming more feminine, but to many female people being feminine isn’t particularly what they want to be or to them what makes someone a woman - a woman is just an individual who happens to be female.
[1] “the experience of pleasure or excitement and intense feelings of well-being and happiness”.
I’ve no problem with people who wish to live in what’s called ‘a gender non-conforming way’ but I do have issue with the view that (for example) “To be identified as woman one must conform to one of a subset of appropriate genders”.
Here’s a thought experiment - if typical female people started behaving more like your father, brother, uncle etc now act - if as a social change the ‘gender’ associated with females became masculine - would you still identify as a woman?
Nothing in your post supports, or is even suggestive of, any such “conflict of rights”.
At most, it demonstrates a conflict of preferences for how gender is ascribed to other people with other people's gender identity, but imposing gender on other people is not a right.
So I apologize but your questions don’t really fit with what I meant. I don’t personally like the idea of rigid gender roles.
The issue which people react so allergic to is the complete lack of tolerance by the transgender community.
If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot. It completely misrepresents the definition of tolerance. Tolerance can only exist in a state of disagreement. If we all agree on something then we have nothing to tolerate. Tolerance is really the act of people accepting that some men want to live their lives like women without actually believing themselves that these men are women. That is tolerance and therefore anyone should be allowed to hold the opinion that trans women are not women but that’s okay because we’re still cool in calling you a female name and complimenting you if you wear a nice dress.
It’s like with religion. It’s perfectly fine to tell a hardcore christian person that you think god doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make you a bigot, just a human being with an opinion. As long as we still let people live their own experiences without fear or discrimination then we don’t all have to believe in the same god. It’s the same about gender ideology. The trans community needs to accept that only because they feel they are something that it doesn’t mean everyone feels that way about them. The vast majority of people have no issue with transgender individuals. They just know that a man with a mental health condition is in principle still a man and we shouldn’t be ostracised to state truths like this.
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
Being transgender alone does not constitute a mental health condition. Dysphoria is the culprit. If people could transition at will The Culture style there would be zero confusion on this point.
The problem is that a lack of genuine acceptance of trans identities (i.e. that trans men are men, and trans women are women) inevitably leads to trans people _not_ being treated the way they want to be treated.
The classic examples of these are bathrooms and athletics. Trans people want to use the bathrooms and compete on athletics teams corresponding to their identity. It sure feels like intolerance when this choice is denied from trans people.
I don’t know your own personal views, but it’s certainly not the case that “the vast majority of people” are aligned with trans people on the above issues.
I know I'm not the first person ever one to bring this up, but it's unclear to me how letting someone with (largely) the physique of a man compete against women is acceptable.
There's a reason why (competitive) sports are usually divided by male/female, and that reason still overall holds for someone who is trans. There's a lot of gray area here depending on if and when they undertook HRT, sure, but labelling this as "intolerance" is not right in my book.
This division is arbitrary. The reason for this is the premise of fair competition that identical people should compete. Yet white males dominate male swimming whereas black males dominate male sprinting. There have been physiological explanations based on center of mass things afaik. Knowing that, why don't we split the competitions accordingly? Martial arts have categories based on weight, why shouldn't we have categories based on arm-length or blood volume? It's easy to see that the whole premise of fair competition is very naïve: where do you stop? What are the criteria for determining if competitors are "identical enough"? Choosing these criteria will be a political choice. Transgender people in sports are disturbing the status quo, but they just made apparent the inherent instability of the thing.
Now i don't know about you, but when i personally do sports, for one i'm not good enough that physiological characteristics make the greatest differences: this problem mostly appears when we reach the limits, by "optimal training". Second, i'm playing as an amateur, that is for entertainment and for the art of it, which means that i will mostly play to be part of a good game, show off and see nice skill displays, and share this experience with other people, some of them with different levels of training and physical capabilities.
I just wanted to say that this thread is imho unrelated to the issues of transgender and more to the fact that competitive sports is broken and the political struggle between professional and amateur sport.
what the hell, how is Men's and Women's sports categorization arbitrary? its clearly defined who plays in which category.
No, actually the reason is that it makes both watching and competing more interesting. A competition where women never got anywhere near first place would mean women would simply stop showing up (or vice versa). A boxing championship with no weight classes would mean no lightweight boxers would sign up.
On the other hand, with enough subcategories you can get to the point where some competitors win by default, or where you have championships of one or two matches.
So no, it's not arbitrary to separate competitors by some physical characteristics and not others. There are practical reasons to do so that are unrelated to the whims of organizers.
If we remove the gender division from, say, javelin throwing (random choice; current difference in world records there is currently 30% for reference). Now there won't be any (cis) women competing at the top level any more.
So somebody goes ahead and creates a women's division (or whatever you want to call it). Should we somehow forbid this? Or would it be required that they accept any transgender individual in any state of transition? And either case is just "back to square 1" - no cis women have a chance. I don't see how "let's remove the 'women' category in this competition in the interest of fairness to trans people" is improving things for anyone...
This is an interesting one.
I definitely find being told I have to accept that "trans women are women" off putting and like the Aesop's fable with the wind and the sun, it feels like the wind blowing and makes me want to hold on to that jacket tighter.
The way I see it, trans women are trans women, and trans men are trans men. They occupy a different category in my mind than either.
I'm trying to imagine how I would feel going to either bathroom as a trans person, and the only answer I can come up with is "riddled with anxiety".
Given the prevalence of sexual violence in our society and the difficulty of getting an appropriate response, I find this statement incredibly ironic. (Out of context, I admit, but it's hard to reconcile the two views.)
#MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
[1] No citations - live your own life, do your own reading, make your own conclusions.
>
> #MeToo is one source of evidence that society absolutely tolerates attacks on women.
Isn't that evidence that society doesn't tolerate these things? Once it was out in the open, society rushed to condemn it. Everywhere. Everyone.
It could only happen when society did not know about it. When it was kept secret.
Society absolutely does not tolerate attacks on women, as the #MeToo movement showed.
Who says so? What has been your personal experience with "the transgender community"? If you're seeing it through the polarized lens of online (specifically big platforms) interaction, then for sure you are seeing it as intolerant. But the same could be said about almost every pov online: most of what we get to see widely is vocal, shallow, unsubstantiated takes. Because that's what get viral.
So for one, there is no such thing as a "transgender community". There are most surely publicized simplified canons of what a transgender person is like, just like there is for "the average white dude", "the academic leftist", "the trump fan" or "the new age craftsy person". The thing is, there are very few person actually like that and the one that are, are usually like that because of tremendous influence of online platforms on their views.
All in all, with all respect, i think you are fighting a strawman. Personally, my course of action in this matter (shallowness, simplifications and argumentative intolerance getting more widespread) is not to fight against it for people you disagree with, because they for sure won't listen to you, but to fight against it for people you actually agree with. This is the thing: in every of these "communities" you describe (transgender, religious, could be anything) there is actually little internal cohesion and there are different political ideals interacting. I prefer to put my own house in order. In fact that's the only thing i can meaningfully impact.
I am a lesbian woman and in a gay dating app I have been receiving dozens of death threats and I was even banned after I got reported by a group of people because I put this sentence in those exact words in my profile:
“I support LGBTQ+ rights and I am a proud member of this wonderfully vibrant community. I welcome all transgender people and count many as my friends. However, without causing anyone upset I would like to state that I am only interested in dating female bodied women and I would kindly ask everyone to respect my sexual preferences.”
I’ve been a lesbian for 39 years and I never felt this hated and attacked by any other group of people. I am not saying that transgender people attack me, but it’s transgender activists (often men who identify as men) who say the most vile and nasty things to me because of my sexual preference which I tried to express in the most respectful way.
I doubt that is the main reason. Society has been pretty clear for a long time that certain people found trans people too strange to accept them. Gay people have been treated the same way. I think most people that don’t like trans people are probably also uncomfortable with gay people even if they are more likely to say it’s okay to be gay.
> If someone points out that a man who really wants to be a women is in principle still a man then they get instantly labelled a bigot.
You can avoid being called a bigot by understanding the following basic concepts.
Sex and gender are two distinct ideas. Gender as described by Judith Butler is a kind of performance that you do. It starts in childhood where we give boys the color blue and toy trucks and we give girls the color pink and dolls. Men wear pants and never wear dresses and women wear dresses and skits and use a purse. A man never wears a purse and if he has anything close it’s called a bag, definitely not a purse.
The above are made up concepts. Clothes and bags and pink and blue are not biological reality, they’re just made up by society. They’re part of a performance of gender. You can change your gender just by changing your performance.
Sex is a biological concept that relates to what secondary sex characteristics your body presents. Hormone levels, genitals, etc. this is still don’t a binary concept as intersex people exist and are something like 1% of the population. It’s also unclear if someone completely changes their hormones and has surgery to change their genitals, what is the point of saying “you’re still a man”? Such a statement is likely to bring up feelings of pain and misery the person has had from people who have been intolerant towards them. It also is unclear if you’re referring to biological sex or gender, and trans people are often terrified that they’re not performing their gender properly.
It’s like going up to a fat person and saying “wow you’re fat” and then walking around saying “fat people are intolerant because they get upset when I call them fat”. Maybe on some level you’re right, but you’re being an asshole if you insist on saying that. And again, if a trans person has severely changed their sex hormones, the concept of “sex never changes” is shaky anyway.
So stop trying to tell trans women they’re really men. Such a statement completely misses all the subtle realities of such a statement, serves no productive purpose, and is rude as hell.
Come on! You can do better! I believe in you!
But you're not even trying to argue this or convince anyone of anything. You're just saying "nuh huh. What I believe in true and applies to everyone whether they like it or not".
I'm guessing there's nothing out there that'll change your mind. You've taken a fundamentalist position, which begs the question why are you here?
Replace "men" and "women" with "black" and "white" and read your stuff again.
Why is that different?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What clothes you wear are part of a performance where the entirety of the performance represents your gender. But not your sex! Changing one thing doesn’t change your gender. But if you change the whole performance, that’s changing your gender. And I don’t really like these concepts of gender, but it’s more of a description of how society views a person. I never got called “ma'am” or “miss” until I started wearing dresses. I’m not really saying that wearing a dress makes you a woman, but I’m saying that wearing a dress and doing the other things makes other people read you as a woman.
Until you’re able to separate the two concepts of sex and gender in your mind you’re going to continue to run in to this issue.
When someone says “trans women are women, not men” they’re talking about gender, not sex. And gender as theorized by Judith Butler is something that we can easily change. Whether we can change sex is a different question and one I’m less qualified to discuss, but it’s irrelevant to the question of changing gender.
Also I'm not convinced that a man being called "ma'am" or "miss" necessarily means that the speaker thinks he's a woman, especially these days. They might be saying it because that's how you're expected to politely address men in dresses these days. Or perhaps, they are being quietly sarcastic about the whole thing.
In summary, I don't accept this Butlerian redefinition of woman, as it's incoherent with reality and relies on guessing what's going on in people's minds. The existing definition of adult human female is fine and there's no need to change it.
Surely you meant people who desire to transition? If I could have that experience in a completely temporary way without messing up my hormones, I might. But I like being a man and don’t want to mess up my health just to experience that. It’s not the same as recommending more people try meditation or volunteering with disabled children. Those things can change your worldview without totally altering your body chemistry.
It’s great that you want to do this and are able to. But I think most people don’t want to.
Personally, I don't think that taking HRT will actually make a man understand women any better, so perhaps my response to GP should have been that.
Edit: fix op/gp monikers
In my experience, the best way to understand how women experience the world is just as you said: spend time with them, talk to them, and - most importantly - listen to them. I think many men could benefit from having more female friends (and I mean truly friends, not secretly trying to get in their pants).
I've learned so much about how differently women experience the world just from befriending many women over the years. It's really opened my eyes to how differently women might experience the same situation. It's amazing how different society treats women and it can be totally invisible to men unless you're willing to look for it. I think it's made me a better husband and father as well.
Edit: sorry, I sorted writing this a while ago while making tea, none of the other responses were there, and now that I've posted it I see a whole bunch of people making similar points. Sorry.
(30 mins with explanations)
I found it really interesting and fun.
No, it doesn't. It says that there are striking differences in the distribution of personality traits between the sexes, and does not take a stand on the source, besides that it is “certainly” a mix of biological and social contributions.
As gender identity, in the current population, correlates very strongly to “sex” [0] (less than 2% of the adult population reports a transgender, nonbinary, or other identity divergent from their “sex” assigned at birth), any strong gender-based personality difference would also be associated with sex, and vice versa.
[0] a misnomer for what is more accurately an externally-ascribed gender; biological sex is multidimensional, the binary division of “sex” by a subset of sex traits is an imposed social construct.
Edit: Nevermind, you can leave the email field blank.
By the way, the test really isn't all that interesting IMO. The results were extremely predictable, in my case at least.
"The biggest correlation we found between gender and any one personality trait was r=0.42, which means that gender explains 18% of the variability in that trait. Another way to put this is... if you knew a random person's score on that one personality trait, and you tried to guess that person's gender using just that score, you'd mispredict that person's gender 31% of the time!"
They think that's low! That's crazy high for just one trait, it would be called "Highly significant" in any paper.
But I'm just making silly comments because it read to me like he's an alien (or maybe GPT is becoming self aware and posting on forums :) )
As a generalized concept (though descriptions of social systems with gender roles distinct from the commonly referenced sex binary are older still, though many of those written by members of societies which did not recognize such a distinctions, including Western European colonialists, were hampered by the absence of terminology to describe it simply) its significantly older than 20 years; with research projects and prominent works on gender identity, in the modern sense, being written as early as the 1950s and 1960s. While the bulk of the writing that early (and for some time after) on the subject pathologized identities that diverged from the social sex/gender correspondence stereotypes, it recognized that they existed, were largely a product of aspects of biology, and while they tended to held out that there was a social contribution to them which made them potentially malleable early on (and advised conversion therapy for that purpose), recognized that they were difficult to impossible to modify beyond early childhood, and in many cases recognized the value of gender confirming procedures beyond that point.
The word "gender" is also translated as 성별, and also has an entry for [grammar] 성 구분, or the grammatical difference between sexes.
However the entry under "gender dysphoria" is "feeling that one's birth sex is not one's sex." So the social role idea is totally missing from the Korean-English dictionary.
The Korean-only dictionary has an entry, however, for 젠더 "jendeo," which is the imported modern Western concept of gender with all its academic usages explained in detail.
What seems like basic reality to you is an American fad to most everyone else.
> Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex.
-I’ve never heard anybody who thought that there was no differences in women and men behaviours on average.
-those differences you pointed out being connected to gender, are actually due to the sex of the individual, not due to the gender an individual chooses to identify with
-Where I came from, this notion is basically non-existent. I meant sex.
ruszki's comment expressed more verbosely would be:
> This idea that sex and gender are distinguishable does not exist where I come from. Previously when I said "women and men" I was referring to the sexes, not to the genders. That is to say, to me "man" and "human male" are synonymous, as are "woman" and "human female".
You had all the information necessary to interpret what was written charitable, but instead for some reason you decided to interpret it as if they were saying something nonsensical.
It’s saying these differences are connected to sex, but it’s not saying they’re not connected gender. Didn’t the article say that research hasn’t been done?
It would be interesting to see whether these differences were more or less correlated with gender rather than sex.
It would also be interesting to see what differences there are between trans and cis men/women, and whether/how these change as a trans person transitions.
We have hundreds of years of claimed differences which today sound a bit silly.
By extension, it could be eliminated in a single generated given total control of the socialisation and schooling process.
This is not a meme or a rare view - Steven Pinker wrote a book countering this worldview 20 years ago.
The only way the above is logical is if there are no inherent differences between men and women. Otherwise, we have no way of determining how much disparity is from inherent factors and how much is from environmental. Put another way: if you believe female (or any race) under representation is caused by discrimination you should be able to define the correct level of representation if there was no discrimination (I have yet to see this number defined in any instance, which is concerning because there’s no way to measure impact or progress).
Given that we’re broadly implementing much policies is strong evidence that many believe there are no inherent differences.
It usually takes the form of insisting that underrepresentation of women in $profession is proof of discrimination and/or a hostile environment.
Relying on our gut like our ancestors, who for example believed in the obvious reality of witches, is the best way to be ignorant of what is really true.
Indeed, if they were real, we would be quite correct to persecute them.
Would we? I'm not familiar with the law that disallows contracts with Satan, or disallows ownership of supernatural powers.
For example I can point you the the hordes of research papers done on the effects of alcohol. The source of cancers, 40-50% of violent crimes are done under the influence of alcohol, predisposition to evils such as gambling, assualts, SA, domestic abuse, drink driving, effects on mental and physical health and much much more. Truly an endless well of evil that stems from this substance. It has been explicitly verified with the scientific method that it carries significant harms that outweigh any so called benifits.
Yet I can guarantee almost all people who assert science as the only way to truth and morality, promote alchol consumption despite the very clear studies backed by research on the depravity of alcohol with regards to the individual and society.
So as much as science can say something is bad, the people who say science is the only way to truth need to be consistent and onboard its conclusions rather than picking and choosing moral boundaries when convenient.
Science is definetly not the only tool for validating reality.
Testimony is an integral part of all of our lives for ascertaining truth. We know that the country of Japan exists because we have maps and images of the place and geography teachers have testified that "this is Japan". It you really think about it, most of your entire life for knowing the truth is testimony. How many times do people pull out their microscope and scientific instruments to verify the world around them using the scientific method? We can even take a step further to say that we use testimony of scientists through their research papers to gain truth and understanding of a matter without having to peer review their papers.
Essentially we can assign high probability something is the truth with testimonials of individuals.
In regards to our ancestors it would be incredible to be dismissive of their experience and testimonies regarding the "supernatural". How is it possible that civilization all across the globe without contact have some sort of ghosts, spirits, demons, Jinns in their world view. Why do we discard their testimony instead on saying what is the probability that civilization without contact all have belief in a super natural entities?
This is an argument from incredulity, a common logical fallacy.
The consensus (across many scientific disciplines) is that our brains are more "buggy"than we realize. We routinely fall for biases, fallacies, superstitions, mass hysterias/hallucinations and other silly behaviour.
We're intellectually sophisticated compared to our ancestors. Yet, many of our contemporaries still "see" ghosts. "The Believing Brain" by Michael Shermer is a very approachable intro to the topic of how this phenomenon came about and why it persists.
> How many times do people pull out their microscope and scientific instruments to verify the world around them using the scientific method
It's a regular occurrence in schools around me. YMMV
> Essentially we can assign high probability something is the truth with testimonials of individuals.
This statement is another example of fallacious logic (specifically, argumentum ad populum).
The business of truth is not a democracy.
> Why do we discard their testimony instead on saying what is the probability that civilization without contact all have belief in a super natural entities?
Because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
These goofy exercises in the eugenics of common sense and the obvious all require us to believe that if I raise one mouse in a dark 6 in^3 wooden box, and let another mouse run free (or even in a different kind of box), that at the end of that process I should still have two identical mice. The fact that men and women have different personalities and cultures is no more necessarily genetic than the fact that the English and the French speak entirely different languages.
I'm sure there are some genetic sex differences, but looking at the huge difference in how society treats kids from the youngest age on, I'm going to say it's very hard to differentiate between genetic vs. society.
Even more we don’t even remotely understand how those confounds work - much less be able to control for them. This is why most psych / sociological experiments are weak.
The problem is not of one isolated mouse but a society of mice and how your physical size, vulnerability (men don't have period pains or pregnancies) affect how you relate to society and thus your personality.
The question of how genetics causes us to mold our children according to gender norms might be at least as interesting as the question of how genetics directly influences preferences.
Women are not a permanent lower caste. In term of their social status (and social economic status) their median are similar, even slightly higher than men. Their variance is much smaller, with few women at the very high and and very few at the very bottom. This difference in variance do causes problem for society but the fixes are less obvious than in cast societies where one demographic fully dominate the bottom of society. When looking at household social status, women have much higher in average social status than men (for the above reasons).
Women are also not victims of violence more men. The opposite is true. Men are much more likely victim of violence then women. Women are much less likely however to be perpetrators of violence towards men. In term of behavior there is also the slightly less known fact that in domestic context, violence from a man to a woman, man towards an other man, and woman towards an other woman is identical in violent domestic disputes per household. This is why the full title of those reports tend to be called "men's violence again women and violence in same sex relationships". The implication in terms of genetics is that either a person sexual preference influence violence, or women and men are equally violent but in different contexts.
(Edit: To pull down some statistics from Sweden as an example. Men are the most common recipient to need social support. Single men without children living below poverty line are more than twice the size of the next group below, which is single women without children living below poverty line. The group after that is single mothers, and the one after that are families with two married adults and at least one child.)
Aren't the females of almost every first world demographic objectively better off than males in many metrics?
They experience longer life, less violence, more social services, better education, more bursaries, less injuries at work, higher median income amongst the entire population, lower sentences for crime ... and more?
Are those metrics not important?